Page 148 of Flame and Sparrow

I stood in the entryway, peering into the tower, trying to make out something—anything—in the darkness within. But I could see nothing, not even just a few feet inside; it was as though the tower’s magic swallowed up all the light that attempted to cross the threshold.

At my back, far in the distance, I heard Zell whinnying loudly. Desperately.

A warning.

I ignored it and stepped inside.

The door slammed shut behind me, plunging me into total darkness—save for the soft glow still emanating from the mark on my wrist.

I tentatively held my hand out in front of me, willing it to burn brighter. I didn’t truly feel like I had control over it, but itdidseem to answer my silent plea. My elven eyes soon adjusted to the blackness as well, and between these things I was able to make out the basic shapes of my surroundings.

Soaring walls of sparkling obsidian rose higher than I could see all around me. The ground was the same pale stone as the pavilion outside, at first, but soon gave way to various different materials. A path of white crystal caught my eye, and I followed it as it sloped and twisted down into the tower’s depths, eventually stretching into a flat corridor. Narrow rivers of turquoise water ran along each side of this corridor, the waters converging toward a single, shimmering pool in the center of a room just ahead.

And behind the pool stood a bright-eyed man dressed in a dark cloak with silver fastenings, smiling up at me as though he’d been eagerly awaiting my arrival.

Chapter40

I threwa glance back up the sloping pathway, toward the exit, but quickly decided I was past the point of running away.

The man continued smiling at me as I descended and approached the sparkling pool. His eyes had solid black centers rimmed by glowing white circles, making me think of ink bleeding out from the middle of a page. He was tall, subtly muscular, all the elegant edges of him suggesting power and grace.

His footsteps made no sound against the stone floor as he stepped to the very edge of the water, directly across from me. His finely made cloak was silent as well, swaying as he walked but without theswishof fabric or the clinking of fastenings that should have accompanied it; I wondered if he was merely an apparition of some sort.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“A keeper of the tower. Nothing more. Nothing less.” His voice matched the rest of his demeanor—smooth yet powerful, twisting silk draped over a steel edge.

“And what is it that you’re keeping?” I asked, gaze flickering to the turquoise water for an instant before darting back up to his face.

“This pool is known asBerethryl. To drink of its water is to forget the taste of all other things, to erase all that came before and start anew.”

After the chaos and pain of the past months, I nearly trembled with the sudden temptation before me. My knees felt weak, threatening to buckle, to bring me closer to the water for a taste, a chance at having even just a part of my pain and confusion erased…

The Tower Keeper was studying me with interest, his handsome face bright in the light of the pool. “Do you wish to be divine, Karys Elendiel? To forget what you were before coming here?”

I jumped only slightly at the sound of my full name from the strange being’s lips.

Of course he knew my name—it was hardly the most unsettling thing I’d encountered in this realm.

“Answer truthfully,” he urged.

Truthfully,Ididwant to forget. I couldn’t deny I sometimes wished for a blank slate, a chance to start over in some place where I wasn’t caught between all the thorny questions and complications I was now.

But I knew better than to be quick to share my answers, my true desires, with any being in the divine realm.

Instead, I pondered both of his questions for a long moment, searching for whatever deception he was trying to conceal—until I realized that something he’d said didn’t make sense.

I distinctly remembered the first conversation I’d had with Dravyn about his life before he became a god—how he’d told me that ascension did not mean forgetting what he’d been in his past. Mairu’s story of her human family and hardships proved this to be true as well. What sort of god or goddess they became was directly tied to what they’d been through as mortals, in a way I never would have guessed at before these months I’d spent among them.

So this water, if it truly made one forget, was not the ascension magic most sought from this tower.

I met the Keeper’s unsettling gaze, and I said, “I didn’t come here because I wished to forget.”

“Then why are you here?”

I wasn’t truly here to ascend, either, so the question stumped me for a moment. His smile widened as the seconds passed, as though it had been his goal to stump me. I also had the distinct impression he was reading my mind—that he already knew why I was here—so it would have been pointless to try to lie to him.

“Because I want to understand,” I answered, truthfully enough. “Because I want to know what fully became of the ones who walked in this tower before me.”

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